MetaCreations Ships Painter 5 for Windows

New Features in Painter 5 Deliver Enhanced Creativity and Increased Productivity for Digital Designers and Graphic Artists

Scotts Valley, CA - June 23, 1997--MetaCreations Corporation (Nasdaq: MCRE) today announced it is now shipping Painter® 5 for Windows. Painter 5, a leading creative tool for Windows, now empowers digital artists and graphic designers with more than one hundred new brushes and creative effects through an extensible plug-in architecture. Other headline features in Painter 5 for Windows are its easier to use interface, and industry-standard masking. Internet publishing capabilities, tear-off tools, customizable palettes and a full Color Management System by Kodak™ make this version of Painter a "must have" for the digital artist's toolbox. Performance tuning with support for Intel's Pentium processor with MMX™ technology completes the package. The Macintosh version of Painter 5 began shipping in May, 1997.

"Painter 5 continues our drive to provide leading graphics software for professionals who require tools that let them create the breakthrough images their clients demand," commented John Wilczak, MetaCreations' CEO and President.

"This is the best, most user-driven version of Painter we have ever produced," said Mark Zimmer, father of Painter, and MetaCreations' Chief Technical Officer. "It contains the expected MetaCreations magic, and one-of-a-kind features that people expect from us, like the Liquid Metal floater that lets you draw with reflective blobs of paint that can be moved and arranged like liquid mercury."

The heart of Painter has always been its unique Natural-Media® brush technology that simulates the look of traditional art tools and techniques. Continuing the tradition, new expandable plug-in brushes in Painter 5 make painting with texture, noise, fire and glow a creative adventure. Clone and distort images or use the Turbulence and Confusion brushes to apply wavy, gaseous looks, never before available. Dynamic Plug-in Floaters perform image processing effects like burning and tearing to the selected item in real time, without changing underlying layers. Achieve a realistic 3D look of thick acrylic paint using the "Impasto" Floater for controllable gloss and thickness. Painter 5's brush architecture has been optimized to take advantage of Intel's Pentium processor with MMX technology. Intel MMX technology allows for faster onscreen performance, by performing color calculations faster. When using large brushes in Painter or working with compositing methods like Gel, Multiply or Darken, Intel's MMX technology makes Painter shine with optimized performance.

Painter 5 offers artists and designers an option to optimize their environment with new customizable palettes and tear-off tools. The improved Paint Bucket tool, Crop tool, Magic wand and custom function keys complete Painter 5's interface enhancements. Always an indispensable tool for web designers, Painter 5 now supports animated GIF export. By using Painter's frame-byframe animation capabilities, web designers can start with QuickTime™ or AVI movies and export GIF animations for use on web pages.

Painter ships with dozens of pre-built color palettes, including the Netscape 216-color palette and the 256-color default palettes for Macintosh and Windows. Painter also allows any graphic to be turned into an image map. A full Color Management System by Kodak and support for Hi-Fi Hexachrome output means Painter 5 users have consistent, high-quality color they can bank on.

Pricing and Availability (U.S. and Canada; English version)

Painter 5 for Windows is now available for the suggested retail price of $449. Upgrades are available to both Macintosh and Windows customers for $99

from either MetaCreations or its channel partners. Customers who purchased Painter 4 after March 31,1997 are eligible to upgrade to Painter 5 for free, plus a shipping and handling charge.

Pricing and Availability (International)

Please note that any offers listed here are for the U.S. and Canada only. For more information about purchasing outside of the U.S. and Canada, please contact your local Fractal Design distributor.

From the Read Me First file:

"This special bundle version of Painter 5.0 is exactly the same as the full retail product. The only difference is your documentation has been provided in an electronic format (as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file) and the software has been pre-serialized. Please look on the Painter CD-ROM, in the Documentation folder, for the Painter Tutorial and User Guide."